Listen Up! Mastering Active Listening for Leadership Excellence.  

Active listening is a powerful process that involves being fully concentrated, aiming to understand, respond and remember what is being said, enabling one to build trust, uncover underlying issues, and inspire effective teamwork. It involves giving the speaker your full attention, showing that you’re engaged and interested, and providing feedback to confirm your understanding. Active listening requires cultivating one’s curiosity to understand the speaker’s feelings, intentions, and perspective. It’s about being present in the moment and genuinely interested in what the other person is saying without judging.

Benefits of Implementing Active Listening in Leadership

1.Enhanced Communication

Active listening fosters clear and open communication between leaders and team members, reducing misunderstandings and conflicts.

2. Improved Relationships

By demonstrating genuine interest and empathy, leaders build stronger relationships with their team members, leading to increased trust and loyalty.

3. Increased Employee Engagement

Employees who feel heard and understood are likelier to be engaged and committed to their work, leading to higher productivity and morale.

4. Better Decision-Making

Leaders who actively listen to diverse perspectives can make more informed decisions that consider their team members’ needs and concerns.

5. Conflict Resolution

Active listening skills are essential for resolving conflicts peacefully and constructively, as they enable leaders to understand the root causes of the conflict and find mutually acceptable solutions.

While the concept of active listening may seem straightforward, its challenges are deeply rooted in history. Let’s take a step back and examine some pivotal research highlighting our enduring struggle to listen effectively.

“People in general do not know how to listen.” (Listening to People – Nichols & Stevens, HBR 1957)¹. “They may hear well but are not making effective use of their ears.”

In 2015, in her article “Everything You Need to Know about Becoming a Better Listener”, Christine Riondan² underlines the importance of actually caring what other people have to say and showing this by ensuring an intake of both verbal and non-verbal information by processing and making sense of what the person is saying, and by responding, validating what they said (which is NOT agreeing with any of it).

She outlines a number of strategies to help one become a better listener:

• Take notes as you listen: draw a line down the page, make general notes on the left and most valuable nuggets on the right
• Recognise your defaults: for example, if you are extrovert, you would probably be doing much talking, or if you are super organised, you may feel too busy with your schedule or your to-do’s to listen
• Wandering mind³:
• pay attention to what is distracting you from listening. Are you planning your response? Are you listening to your inner critic?
• Notice if something is blocking you from listening. Then simply note it! If you belabour it, you will not be listening for longer. And shift your attention back to listening.

• Own emotions¹: our own emotions can muddy the waters. The invitation is to notice and withhold your evaluation, and then, with judgment suspended, you can hunt for evidence that proves your position WRONG. We can prove ourselves right without conscious effort. Looking at both, we are less in danger of missing what people have to say.
• Ask questions⁴: when the other is upset and venting, we have a big temptation to share our own experiences OR to want to fix the problem. So we may try the approach of “Don’t fix, just listen”, where we sit and listen and not say anything; however, the speaker does not feel seen & heard, so not ideal either. Rather, as Mark Goalston, author of “Just Listen”, outlines, ask questions and get any anger or frustration out in the open, supporting the speaker to make sense on their own. They will feel heard, and you will get to the root of the problem.

The basic problem with listening is that we think faster than we can talk. Give your brain something to do while you listen, like make notes, actively look for non-verbal cues, ask yourself, “What might the speaker NOT be saying?” or weigh the evidence being presented.

Clearly, we can’t necessarily turn those around us into better speakers, but we can ALL make ourselves better listeners.

In their article, “What Great Listeners Actually Do”, leadership consultants Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman give us some pragmatic suggestions on making ourselves better listeners. Zenger & Folkman conducted research and analysed data describing the behaviour of 3,492 participants in a development program designed to help managers become better coaches⁵. As part of this program, the managers’ coaching skills were assessed by others in 360-degree assessments. Zenger and Folkman identified those who were perceived as being the most effective listeners (the top 5%). They then compared the best listeners to the average of all other managers in the data set.

Most people think that there are three components to listening:

• Not interrupting the speaker.
• Following along with facial expressions and positive noises (hmm, yes, nodding, aha...)
• Being able to repeat back verbatim what the speaker said.

These may enable one to be a good listener, however, they fall short of being a great listener. Zenger & Folkman arrived at some unexpected conclusions. The behaviours that made certain managers outstanding listeners enabled them to transcend listening to all that isn’t said, and they were explicitly ACTIVE in their engagement in their conversations. The researchers organised their conclusions into four main areas. These areas transcend traditional active listening wisdom.

The 4 pillars to becoming a great listener

1. Good listening is much more than being silent while the speaker talks.

By periodically asking questions, we promote discovery and insight and can challenge assumptions in a constructive way gently. It also signals that we are listening and paying attention, thus the speaker feels seen and heard. In other words, it’s a two-way dialogue vs a passive interaction between speaker and listener. Sitting in silence and making positive noises does not provide any evidence that we are listening. Asking good questions does. The best conversations are active.

2.  Good listening includes interactions that build the other person’s self-esteem.

Making the dialogue a positive experience for the other party, where the speaker feels supported, and the listener conveys confidence in the person. This doesn’t happen when the listener is passive or critical. A good listener creates a safe environment for openly discussing issues or differences. The speaker thus feels heard and, more importantly, understood.

There is NO experience of good listening without psychological safety⁴.

3.  Good listening is seen as a cooperative conversation

In a cooperative interaction, feedback flows smoothly in both directions, with neither party becoming defensive about comments the other makes. The speaker may challenge assumptions or disagree; the listener experiences this as the speaker trying to help vs win an argument. In contrast, in competitive or positional listening, the listener is more interested in promoting their own point of view, is more distracted, is listening for weak points to attack/interrupt/justify. While this may make one an excellent debater, it doesn’t make one a good listener.

4.  Good listeners tend to make suggestions.

What surprised Zenger & Folkman is that good listeners integrated some feedback. It’s not uncommon to hear complaints that so-and-so didn’t listen, he just jumped in and tried to fix me. However, when feedback is provided in a way that others accept, it opens up possibilities or alternative paths. The insight coming from their research is that making suggestions is not the problem. It is rather the skill with which the suggestions are made and when in the conversation the suggestions are made.

We’re also more likely to accept suggestions from people we already think are good listeners. Someone who is silent for the whole conversation and then jumps in with a suggestion may not be seen as credible. Someone who seems combative or critical and then tries to give advice may not be seen as trustworthy.

In conclusion, in order to become great listeners, we should stop trying to be a sponge and absorb all the information coming at us, but to rather be like a trampoline, where we are there to bounce ideas off, to amplify, to energise and to clarify the speakers thinking.

What You Can Do to Develop Your Active Listening Skills

By integrating active listening techniques into your leadership style, you can cultivate your capacity to become a great listener. Before making any changes to your listening skills, we highly recommend that you build your self-awareness of how you listen and with whom. To do so, we have put together a self-observation activity that will make you more conscious and aware of how you listen, speak, and behave.

What is a Self-Observation?

• Waking up to the world: Most of our days fly past in a blur. For much of that time we are not fully aware and conscious of what’s happening and our choices. We end up repeating the things we do and say that we are comfortable with, even if they’re not optimal for us or those around us.
• Non-judgemental data gathering: Becoming aware – gathering data in a non-judgemental way – gives us a choice. Before we jump into changing something in our lives, we must understand what exactly we are doing, what is triggering us to do this (emotionally, mentally and physically) and the impact this unconscious habit has on our lives and relationships.

Self-observation: “How well do I listen?”

Imagine having a non-judgmental learning partner – yourself- at the start of each day. One who is watching what’s happening and what you are doing or saying or about to. You are looking for moments when you are involved in aspects relating to the purpose of this self-observation. Either before or in the middle of an action or conversation, notice the following:

• Am I really listening to what people are saying to me? Or am I simply telling them what I think?
• How is this helping or hindering the conversation?
• What would allow me to listen more?

Write down a few notes or type them into your cellphone.

At the end of each day, explore the following questions:

• When did I listen actively? With whom/in what situation?
• When did I use positional listening? With whom/ in what situation?
• How did it feel to listen actively/positionally? What was the impact?
• What patterns am I starting to see?

Duration and Support

Please do this Self-Observation daily for the next month and see which of your listening habits you want to change. We’d like to invite you to reach out to someone who would be willing to check in with you to make sure you are doing your self-observation each day. You might ask them to do the exercise at the same time as you – you can then reciprocate the support.

When you feel ready, we encourage you to experiment with some of the techniques outlined above to become a great listener and watch as your leadership effectiveness soars.

Active listening is a key component of coaching others as a leader. Should you be interested in cultivating a coaching competency as a leader and integrating coaching as a leadership tool, we invite you to join our 2-day Leader as Coach.

Leader as Coach is a transformative two-day course geared to amplify a leader’s effectiveness. Step into the art of developing others and sparking innovation within your team. This course hones your coaching skills and mindset and empowers you to break patterns of creating overdependence, feeling overwhelmed, and becoming disconnected. You will also practice and hone your Active Listening skills over the 2-days.

The Leader as Coach is rooted in integral theory, which formed the foundation of our six leadership conversations. The Leader as Coach course is delivered in collaboration with the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business. You will learn the fundamentals of coaching and how to use it to provide support, build a common language for coaching, and have a better working relationship with others. “Leader as Coach” will give you a solid foundation for developing and growing your team members.

If you aim for self-development and want to become a certified coach, we offer you the opportunity to join our internationally certified six-month online Coaching for Development course. It is an intensive coach training and apprenticeship programme designed for participants to emerge as coach practitioners, able to see the world through someone else’s eyes, and, at the same time, able to skillfully coach them to improved performance in any aspect of their lives. This course is ideal for those interested in evoking excellence in others while also being open to receiving coaching so they, too, can bring forward excellence in their endeavours.

In conclusion, mastering active listening is not just about being silent while someone else talks; it’s about engaging, understanding, and responding to enhance mutual respect and trust.

Remember, the journey to becoming a great listener is ongoing, but it’s one of the most valuable paths you can pursue in leadership. Start now, and witness the transformative impact active listening can have on your team and organisation.

Should you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected]

References:

1. Listening to People – Nichols & Stevens, Harvard Business Review 1957
2. Everything you need to know about becoming a better listener – Christine Riondan, Harvard Business Review 2015
3. Own the Room: Discover your signature voice to master your leadership presence – Amy Jen Su & Muriel Maignan Wilkins 2013
4. Active Listening Isn’t What You THINK It Is – Achim Nowak, 2021
5. What Great Listeners Actually Do – Zenger & Folkman, Harvard Business Review 2016
6. Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone – Mark Goulston, 2009

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Daniel will advise you on coaching and leadership development. He will be delighted to give a 30 minutes free Q&A interview to deal with any specific question you may have.

Send an email to [email protected] to book an appointment.